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February 12, 2017 - January 7, 2018
The first is maitri, which can be translated as loving-kindness or benevolence.
Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love.
The second element of true love is compassion, karuna.
The third element of true love is joy, mudita. If there is no joy in love, it is not true love.
The fourth element is upeksha, equanimity or freedom. In true love, you attain freedom.
Being there is very much an art, the art of meditation, because meditating is bringing your true presence to the here and now.
The most precious gift you can give to the one you love is your true presence.
because in our daily life our mind and our body are rarely together.
With mindful breathing, you can bring body and mind together in the present moment, and every one of us can do it, even a child.
The Buddha left us an absolutely essential text, the Anapanasati Sutta, or Discourse on the Practice of Mindful Breathing. If you really want to practice Buddhist meditation, you must study this text.
We must bring about a revolution in our way of living our everyday lives, because our happiness, our lives, are within ourselves.
She did not do this, and I do not want you to make the same mistake in your everyday life. We are subject to misperceptions every day, so we have to pay attention. Every time you think it is somebody else who is causing the suffering, you must remember this story. You must always check things out by going to the person in question and asking for his or her help: “Dear one, I am suffering so much, help me please.”
According to Buddhism, we are dealing with samyojana, the lump of suffering within us that is translated as an “internal formation.” When you say something that makes another person suffer, that person develops an “internal formation.”
In Buddhism we talk about a bodhisattva called Avalokiteshvara, the one who has the ability to listen and to understand the suffering of others. If we evoke his name, it is in order to learn to listen.
ASSOCIATED WITH THE PRACTICE of deep listening is the practice of loving speech. We must learn to speak with love again.
Meditation is the practice of looking deeply into the nature of your suffering and your joy. Through the energy of mindfulness, through concentration, looking deeply into the nature of our suffering makes it possible for us to see the deep causes of that suffering.
“The object of your practice should first of all be yourself. Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself.”
If you are not able to take care of yourself, if you are not able to accept yourself, how could you accept another person and how could you love him or her? So it is necessary to come back to yourself in order to be able to achieve the transformation.
We are afraid of the suffering that is inside us, afraid of war and conflicts.
Caring for yourself, reestablishing peace in yourself, is the basic condition for helping someone else. So that the other can stop being a bomb, a source of pain for ourselves and others, you really have to help him to defuse the bomb. To be able to provide help, we have to have a little calm, a little joy, a little compassion in ourselves. This is what we get from mindfulness in everyday life, because mindfulness is not something that is only done in a meditation hall; it is also done in the kitchen, in the garden, when we are on the telephone, when we are driving a car, when we are doing the
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If you can do it this way, three weeks are enough to transform the pain inside you, to bring back your joy in living, to cultivate the energy of compassion with which you can help the person you love.
there is a deep pain within you, meditate.
From this looking deeply is born deep vision, understanding. Mindfulness brings concentration, understanding, love, and freedom.
We could say that when the energy of compassion and love touches us, healing establishes itself.
On the contrary we should open our door so that our suffering can come out. We are afraid of doing that, but Buddhism teaches us that we should not be afraid, because we have available to us an energy that should help us to care for our pain—the energy of mindfulness.
It loses energy every time it is embraced by the energy of mindfulness, which is really a mother.
That is why the Buddha taught us to invite fear into our mindful consciousness and care for it every day.
be grateful for your pains, be grateful for suffering—you will need them. We have to learn the art of transforming compost into flowers. Look at a flower: it is beautiful, it is fragrant, it is pure; but if you look deeply you can already see the compost in the flower. With meditation, you can see that already. If you do not meditate, you will have to wait ten days to be able to see that.
This is the nonduality principle of Buddhism: there is nothing to throw away. If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness.
“Breathing in—I am aware of my eyes. Breathing out—I am smiling at my eyes.”
“Breathing
in—I am aware of my heart; breathing out—I am smiling at my heart.”
This evening, we will touch our heart with the energy of mindfulness. “Breathing in—I know that you are there; breathing out—thank you for being there.”
“Dear one, I know that you are suffering; that is why I am here for you.”
WITHOUT MINDFULNESS, WE LIVE LIKE the dead. And every time mindfulness is born, we are born again into the country (Pure Land) of Buddha, on Buddha’s earth, into the Kingdom of God.
When we walk without mindfulness, we sacrifice the present moment to some destination somewhere—we are not alive.
“I am determined to practice deep listening. I am determined to practice loving speech.”
“Breathing in—I know that he is alive in my arms; breathing out—I am very glad about it.”
In Buddhism, we call this samatha—stopping, concentration, calm. When calm is there, we are able to practice deep looking.
If you are a journalist, a teacher, or a filmmaker, you should practice mindfulness—for the sake of your own calm and your own happiness, but also for that of other people as well. Because we need your calm, your compassion, your understanding. So we should be mindful as individuals but also as a community, as a family, as a nation.
We are afraid of everything—of our death, of being alone, of change—and the practice of mindfulness helps us to touch nonfear.
When we talk about the theology of “God is dead,” this means that the notion of God must be dead in order for God to reveal himself as a reality.
We must not get caught in the trap of notions and concepts.
